Elizabeth Davies: A word to the haters: Haiti needs our help

If you’ve turned on your television set for something other than the NFL playoffs in the past 12 days, you’ve likely seen at least one devastating image coming out of Haiti.

Elizabeth Davies

If you’ve turned on your television set for something other than the NFL playoffs in the past 12 days, you’ve likely seen at least one devastating image coming out of Haiti.

Perhaps you saw a shot of unclaimed bodies lying in the street, victims of the 7.0 earthquake that hit this small and impoverished nation. Maybe you saw someone being pulled, barely alive, from beneath the rubble. Or maybe you caught an aerial view of entire buildings that seemingly fell with the ease of a 4-year-old’s Lego city.

In the aftermath of Haiti’s earthquake, we’ve seen the victims. We’ve heard from the survivors. We’ve watched the volunteers.

And, unfortunately, now we are hearing from the haters.

You’ve probably seen the haters’ Facebook posts, or read their meanderings on a random blog. Maybe you listened to them at a cocktail party, and immediately wished you hadn’t struck up that particular conversation.

You can recognize a hater just moments into a conversation about Haiti. They’re the ones who immediately start complaining that the United States is sending too many resources to help this third-world nation instead of giving them to the poor within our own borders.

Blows your mind? Mine, too.

It’s beyond my comprehension that anyone could be so self-serving as to say that we shouldn’t be helping the poorest country in our hemisphere in the days after a natural disaster. To compare Haitian poverty to the poor in the U.S. is entirely inappropriate, even before the earthquake.

Many of the people who are considered poor in this country still have chips, soda and TV sets. There’s a general expectation that everyone here has access to heated homes and running water — even if those things come by way of an emergency shelter or subsidized housing.

A person living in poverty in the U.S. earns roughly $15 a day. While there does not appear to be a defined poverty line in Haiti, it’s been estimated to be closer to $2 a day.

In the U.S., the census bureau figures that between 14 percent and 17 percent of the population live beneath the poverty level. In Haiti, 80 percent live in poverty, says NationsEncyclopedia.com.

More than half of the Haitian population does not have reliable access to clean water, and that was before the earthquake.

Two years ago, I interviewed Dr. John and Linda Underwood, a husband and wife who are also a physician and nurse with SwedishAmerican Health System. The couple has gone to Haiti twice a year for more than a decade to provide free health care to people who otherwise might die of treatable illnesses.

The stories they recounted were disturbing. As a mother, some simply sent chills down my back.

Dr. Underwood told me that half of the children in Haiti don’t survive to see their fifth birthdays.
He said that nursing children who were orphaned were at risk of starving to death without their mother there to feed them.

And the one fact that still haunts me: Orphaned Haitian babies will be fed rolled-up pieces of clay in lieu of food. There simply isn’t any food for them, and by filling their bellies with something, it stops them from crying for a while.

So the babies eat dirt. Because that’s all they have.

That is poor. It’s not unfortunate or underserved. It’s gut-wrenchingly poor. And that was Haiti before it was unraveled by the earthquake. That was Haiti in the best of times.

The 700 miles of ocean between the U.S. and Haiti might as well be 7,000 miles: The countries are a world apart. The two cannot be compared. To do so is ignorant and arrogant.

So, as human beings, it’s our duty to give to these people who started with nothing, and who have just been devastated by the extreme loss of human life and basic infrastructure.

And as Americans, we should be glad that we’re rich enough to help.

Elizabeth Davies writes for the Rockford Register Star. This column is the opinion of the writer and not of the newspaper.

To donate

Dr. John and Linda Underwood plan to return to Haiti next month. Donations to their organization are tax-deductible and used in full for medical supplies. For more information or to make a donation, contact:

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